A Divide-and-Conquer Tiling Method for the Design of Large Aperiodic Phased Arrays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel divide-and-conquer irregular tiling method for designing large aperiodic phased arrays, improving coverage and efficiency for applications like LEO satellite communications.

Contribution

It presents an innovative tiling strategy that enhances large phased array design by subdividing the aperture into locally tiled sub-areas, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Effective coverage of large arrays demonstrated

Improved computational efficiency over state-of-the-art methods

Practical guidelines for satellite communication applications

Abstract

Due to the growing request from modern wireless applications of cost-affordable and high-gain scanning antenna solutions, the design of large phased arrays (PAs) with radiating elements organized into modular clusters with sub-array-only amplitude and phase control is a key topic. In this paper, an innovative irregular tiling method is proposed where, according to a divide-and-conquer strategy, the antenna aperture is subdivided into sub-areas that are locally domino-tiled by jointly fulfilling the full-coverage condition on the remaining untiled part of the PA support. Selected representative results, including comparisons with competitive state-of-the-art synthesis methods, are reported to prove the effectiveness and the computational efficiency of the proposed tiling approach. Use-cases of current relevance for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications are discussed, as well, to provide the antenna designers useful practical guidelines for handling large PAs.